Before the age of the internet, I had never encountered another Ryan McIntyre. I thought it was a relatively rare name. But now that I live in the global village (and subscribe to a vanity search for my name on Google Alerts), I have come to realize that there are many Ryan McIntyres out there…
In the years after Excite went public (way back in 1996) each of my co-founders responded to their sudden newfound wealth in different ways. Naturally, as single young males, several of us decided to buy fancy cars. I bought a Porsche, a couple other guys bought Ferraris, while my buddy Martin (a true iconoclast) instead…
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (here, here and here), I am a big fan of Sonos. When they added standalone (no PC required) Rhapsody support a while back, I was pretty excited and Sonos converted me into a paying subscriber to Rhapsody. Now they’ve added another great service with the release of version 2.2…
Last September, I gave a presentation at an event called The Startup Junkie Underground about my experiences as a co-founder of Excite, which I co-founded with five of my classmates from Stanford in 1993. We’ve all gone on to do our own things since then. I became a VC in January 2000 when I joined…
This is a somewhat arcane post, but I’m hoping that the astute readers of my blog might be able to connect me with someone who has expertise with Yamaha digital mixers and Aviom personal monitoring systems since I need to make some buying decisions in the near future and I’ve been unable to get all…
Caution: extremely nerdy post. Back in the early days of Excite, just after we closed our first venture round, each of us received our own Sun workstation, truly a milestone moment, and a big upgrade from the surplus Sun 3 and Sun 4 workstations that we shared in a Palo Alto garage using vt220 terminals…
Vote early, vote often (just kidding). The Slingbox Pro is one of the contenders for Engadget’s Home Entertainment Device of the Year. Go to Engadget to cast your vote. Technorati Tags: Slingbox
I woke up this morning and unfolded the front page of the New York Times to discover that Kurt Vonnegut is dead at 84. He was a great writer whose book Cat’s Cradle was a big influence on my worldview. When I was in the ninth grade, the book was a reading assignment in my…
I came across a post today by Matt Haughey on PVRblog who writes about using his Slingbox so he can catch up on his TiVo’d Jon Stewart and Colbert Report episodes by perching his laptop on the handlebars of his elliptical trainer while working out. That’s a great use of in-the-home placeshifting and something I’ve…
EDN magazine gave Akustica a “2006 Innovator of the Year” award in the Mixed Signal ASSP category for their AKU2000 digital microphone chip, which has seen early adoption in laptops, most notably in Fujitsu’s Lifebooks. Akustica’s digital microphones have tremendous advantages over traditional ECM microphones, most notably EMI immunity, surface mountability, smaller size and better…